Today, please welcome writer JOSEPHINE HUMPHREYS.

I’m on tour today. I’ll be open to the public from five to seven.

That’s how I’m thinking of it anyway, as I make my morning coffee in the kitchen. In reality, the event is a tour of studios at the Confederate Home, where I’ve had an office for twenty-five years. Once a refuge for war widows and orphans, the Home is a conglomeration of old Charleston buildings surrounding a big green secret courtyard. It’s still a residence for women in need, but studio rooms are rented to artists, mostly painters and writers. This evening, people will pay money to come see us in our working habitat.

I dread the tour. I want it to be over. I always feel an increasing crush of anxiety before any public event. My simple goal for the day is to stay calm. If dread gets the upper hand, it can make me physically sick, or at least so sleepy I can hardly move.

As is often the case, I’m alone in the house. Husband and dog have gone off together, farming and fishing. They’re adventurers, those two. My own adventures, which by the Latin roots of the word would signify going somewhere, happen mainly inside my head. And for some time now I’ve been writing at home instead of in my office. I claim it’s because I simply got used to that pattern when my father lived his final few years with us, and that’s partly true. But also, I just plain love solitude, even though it can make me lonesome. This paradox is my lifelong quandary.

View of the Confederate Home by Brandon Coffey

In my childhood the old Southern strictures still included the rule that women should keep to “the private sphere” and never do anything that would attract attention, like take to the stage or write a letter to the newspaper. I didn’t agree, but gradually I found that the private sphere actually suited me. Not that I wanted a life confined to domesticity. What I wanted was the freedom (and even a certain, almost magical, power) that comes with anonymity. I wanted what Keats called Shakespeare’s “negative capability,” a state of mind that renders writers “capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts,” and allows them to imagine themselves into the selves of a multitude of disparate fictional characters, without the blockade of personal ego.

I do understand that my ego’s pretty healthy. As I wrote long ago: “I have that strange combination of self-doubt and vanity that serves writers well.”

At 9 a.m., after two cups of coffee and a prolonged period of staring at the yard from my porch (a new species of weed has invaded), I decide to wash my hair and iron something to wear. Unfortunately I can’t find the iron. The last time I used it was more than a year ago. I’ll just have to find something that’s already smooth. Later on I’ll put on makeup, which I rarely use and never really got the hang of, but lipstick and mascara will be a good disguise. I will curl my hair and wear a dressy dress. I might wear heels. Yes, that could work. All I have to do is figure out a way to get through the day.

Writing is out of the question, so I spend a couple of hours doing mindless things—laundry, Facebook, weed-pulling. These turn out to be too mindless, leaving room for awareness of me. I need something that will take me away. So I go to the place that has become my number one escape, a different world in a different time in a different language. I go to Haiti.

View from the Confederate Home by Brandon Coffey

I’ve been reading about Haiti, or St. Domingue just as it was becoming Haiti, for years. My French has improved, but the reading still requires effort. I log in to the University of Florida’s almost-complete digital collection of a newspaper called “Les Affiches Américaines,” first published in St. Domingue in 1769, and I fall into the island’s contradictory miscellany of wealth and slavery, sugar and war, atrocity and beauty, horror and hope. My silly tourophobia slips away, my single self yields to other selves—the sugar-planter’s daughter, the free woman of color, a lieutenant in the army of Toussaint, an American sea captain looking for his sweetheart in the rubble of a burned plantation. I’m the French confectioner advertising chocolates while cities burn, the enslaved woman hiding in her pocket a lethal dose of poison, the mulatto sisters dreaming of a theatrical career in Paris before dying in the crazed streets of Port-au-Prince. I am the child watching as the flag is raised by the black men who defeated Napoleon.

Is it really possible to hold these contradicting multitudes inside me? Walt Whitman says yes. I charge myself up with negative capability until it’s time to go.

Past time, in fact. I slap on lipstick and blush, draw some eyebrows that end up looking Joan-Crawfordy, so I scrub them off. I check the clock, throw on a not-too-wrinkled black shirt and slacks with flat shoes, and go.

Threading my way down the peninsula through tourists and traffic, transitioning from the Haitian Revolution to the Confederate Home, I’m thinking that an important part of life in the South, especially for writers, is the mystery of living and working in a place where history raises questions, and where we are reminded of complex, difficult, troubling things every day of our lives.

Photo credit: Brandon Coffey

When you open the door of the Home, what you see is a short dim hallway and then the huge courtyard, with a long row of apartments on one side, three floors up, piazzas on each level. In the waning October light, the courtyard’s a muted green. The air is cool, and music’s coming from somewhere. The artists and some of the residents—all of whom I’m crazy about and haven’t seen in a long time—are standing in the grass, awaiting the arrival of the public. I wonder if everyone feels what I feel, which now is not dread but the very opposite—elation. I’m all but transformed by this gathering with other living souls in this mystery-laden place. There’s time to chat with a few of my favorites: Catherine who restores old paintings, Matthew who writes cookbooks, Martha who takes pictures. I say, “I’ve missed you!” but what I mean is, “I love you!”

And when the doors open to the guests, I’m in my studio being a writer, at once public and private, certain of very little in this world but at least not in disguise. I’m me. The folks who come are eager to talk about writing. Some are old friends, some strangers—neighbors, tourists, newcomers, young and older (mostly older), men and women (mostly women.) About a third have read something I wrote, so we talk, take pictures, tell stories. I can’t imagine what I was dreading all day long. I want the tour never to end.

~

AND THOSE SAME 3 QUESTIONS…

1. What is the best book you’ve read in the last few months and how did you choose it?

• I’ve been reading only nonfiction for about a year, and a recent favorite is When the United States Spoke French by Francois Furstenberg, a lively account of five French immigrants to the U.S. When I’m deep into writing fiction, I try not to read it. Good novels cast me into self- doubt, and not-so-good novels do exactly the same thing.

2. Would you give us one little piece of writing advice?

• The most important piece of advice I have to give, both to myself and to others, is “Accumulate pages.” Without pages, there is nothing. No amount of planning, outlining, workshopping, dreaming, or revising old stuff will make a book.

3. What is your strangest reading or writing habit?

• Sometimes my inner clock changes when I’m writing furiously. I begin to wake and write earlier and earlier every morning as the book progresses, until near the end I’m often starting work before one AM after just a few hours of sleep.

By Josephine Humphreys

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—Other Writers in the Series—

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I have been looking into schedules. Even when we read physics, we inquire of each least particle, What then shall I do this morning? How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives. What we do with this hour, and that one, is what we are doing. A schedule defends from chaos and whim. It is a net for catching days. It is a scaffolding on which a worker can stand and labor with both hands at sections of time.

On the first of each month,
a guest writer
shares
how he or she spends the day.

photo credit: Envision South Carolina

November 1, 2015: Josephine Humphreys

Josephine Humphreys is one of the writers I was reading when I decided, I want to do what they do. In those days, I inhaled Dreams of Sleep, Rich in Love, The Fireman’s Fair, and I can no longer remember which one I read first. Perhaps my favorite is her debut–Dreams of Sleep, winner of the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award. I’m partial to novels about marriages. I’ve read it at least twice and have underlinings all the way through (and notes like, “see p. 112”).

Late in the novel, there’s this passage:

Iris is glad the clothes don’t seem to fit. May they never fit! If she were their mother she’d teach them these things are nothing, the clothes and toys and furniture. These things fool people into thinking they must stay where the things are. Leave it all, she’d teach them, even your hopes, and all the dreams of safe, calm places. Go with what is most terrifying, the dizzying empty night and the lonely stars until night slows and you see the whole design. Always choose love over safety if you can tell the difference, she’d teach them.

When I started writing this post, I was struck by how captivating, and different one from the other, each of the openings of these three novels is.

Dreams of Sleep, published in 1984:

Before they wake, sunlight is on the house, moving on the high east wall and windows through old glass wavy as broken water, onto the hard bright floor of waxed pine. When Alice opens her eyes she sees its cool path stamped by the shadow of mullions, squares stretching to rhomboids of clear fall sun. Will sleeps behind her, his breath wisping her back. She loves the quiet of light and its mutable geometry, as those wizards did who chinked and slit their stones to let in messages from sun gods. The message to Alice is, Don’t move. Not till that first stamp of light touches the wide crack in the floorboards. Till then she is frozen. The room is frozen. Only two things may move–the slow light, and his feathery perfect breath between her shoulder blades.

I’m a language nut so I’m swooning. And I love being inside a woman’s head. Plus, from the first paragraph we know there’s a “they,” a narrator who can move outside Alice’s head (before they wake), and that “they” is Alice and Will. Frozen is repeated. Alice sees the world in light and shapes and messages.

Rich in Love, published in 1987:

On an afternoon two years ago my life veered from its day-in day-out course and became for a short while the kind of life that can be told as a story–that is, one in which events appear to have meaning. Before, there had been nothing worth telling the world. We had our irregularities; but every family has something or other out of whack. We had my mother’s absent-mindedness, my sister’s abnormal beauty, my father’s innocence; and I was not without oddities of my own. We were characters, my friend Wayne said. But nothing about us was story material.

Until the day, May 10, when one of us betrayed the rest and set off a series of events worth telling.

With Rich in Love, right away we know we’re going to be told a story worth telling, a story that is only two years old and contained in that two-year period, a story about a family. Then we have the lovely list of oddities, but we are not told what the narrator’s oddity is. The specificity of the list combined with a missing element heightens the tension. And…we know there will be a family betrayal. Which can be specifically pinned to May 10th. How can we not keep reading?

The Fireman’s Fair, published in 1991:

In his lawn chair under the Carolina sun, Rob Wyatt sat recuperating, keeping an eye on what was out there–his ruined island town, the blue yonder–as if recovery could be gained by the old southern method of sitting, mulling one’s fate, watching things that don’t move much. Over the deserted houses, the water tower loomed. Air stirred in the oleander. Sunk in the mud marsh across the street, listing but upright, was a white piano, by now not a strange sight among the herons and the barn swallows–for now, and here, one saw extraordinary things. Past the piano was a stairway leading to nowhere, and then a four-poster bed, forlorn but inviting. Rob believed in salvage. He could have retrieved some good things; but instead he let them be, as reminders.

Whereas in Dreams of Sleep, the sunlight was moving; in The Fireman’s Fair, things don’t move much. Whereas in the debut, we started inside; here, we start outside. With strong “r” words: recuperating, ruined, recovery, retrieved, reminders. And Rob. Rob Wyatt–we’re starting at a farther distance away from the character than we did with Alice. Place is important–mentioned over and over in this opening–the Carolina sun, the island town, the old southern method of sitting, the mud marsh… “S” words too–sun, southern, sitting, sunk, strange, swallows, stairway, salvage. I just love language. And these images–the white piano, the stairway leading to nowhere, the four-poster bed.

Nowhere Else on Earth, published in 2000, is a historical novel that takes place in 1864 in North Carolina amidst Union and Confederate fighting. Sixteen-year-old Rhoda Strong falls in love with the outlaw hero Henry Berry Lowrie, and she struggles not only for love but also for survival.

Josephine is a native of Charleston, South Carolina, which is the setting for the first three of her novels. She wrote about Charleston for the Smithsonian.com. 

I’ve lived my whole life here. I know too much. Nothing I see is simply scenery or event, but all is overlaid with memories, and those memories with other memories and stories, plus the truth of history as I’ve learned it over time, and finally with a film of dreams and losses, bits of music, discoveries, tragedies, wild comedy and fragments of desire. I never think of Charleston as my “hometown.” I don’t know what I should call it, except maybe my life.

Come back on NOVEMBER 1st to read how JOSEPHINE HUMPHREYS spends her days.